What does a trillion dollars look like?

This is a discussion on What does a trillion dollars look like? within the Off Topic & Humor Discussion forums, part of the The Back Porch category; With all the talk of trillion dollar bailouts, here is a website that will put it all in perspective.
Trillion dollars...

"He went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in reality a wolf of the Steppes. He had learned a good deal . . . and was a fairly clever fellow. What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life. The cause of this apparently was that at the bottom of his heart he knew all the time (or thought he knew) that he was in reality not a man, but a wolf of the Steppes."

It won't matter in a very short time the dollar will have no value. A hundred million nothings still equals nothing.

+1
I think someone did the math at some point and it was something to the effect of, if you stacked one trillion in one dollar bill increments starting on the ground, you could stack it literally 1/4th of the way to the moon.

"Sure, As long as the machines are workin' and you can call 911. But you take those things away, you throw people in the dark, and you scare the crap out of them; no more rules...You'll see how primitive they can get."

if the math is correct

$1T is 100M of those $10K stacks, or 100,000,000 * 0.394inH, or 621 miles into the sky.

With each of those 1000 pallets taking up ~1.356 cu yards, that's 1356 cu yards of space for all of them. If the average dump truck holds 16 cu yards, that's nearly 85 dump trucks' full of cash. $1T.

Imagine $10T, which takes up 1000 times that amount of space, or 1.16 cu mile. With each $10K stack stacked right on top of each other, that pile would reach just over 6200 miles into the sky.

Bill Gates' estimated net worth is a relatively paltry $40B, now. A smaller stack of "bills," no matter how you slice it. Though taller than Mt. Everest, his pile would not quite reach the underbelly of the next 747 passenger plane that you see flying overhead (a stack 32K ft high). Not flying quite so high as in past years. But then, the dollar ain't what it used to be.